Prologue
NOT LONG AGO WHILE PACKING AWAY SOME BOOKS, I CAME ACROSS an old notebook labeled “Pithies.” Inside were short quotes from philosophers that I had jotted down, one per page, most with barely legible comments scribbled below them.
I had to smile. I had almost forgotten about this little collection of mine. The first entries bore the unmistakable blots and smudges of ink from a fountain pen notes to myself written some fifty years ago with the pen given to me by my parents as a high school graduation gift. I must have been nineteen or twenty then and had just decided to major in philosophy in college.
The reason for that decision and for this notebook was that I had hoped to find some guidance from the great philosophers on how best to live my life. At the time, I didn’t have a clue as to what I wanted to do after college; basically all I knew was that I didn’t want to be a doctor, lawyer, or businessman, eliminations that put me in a distinct minority of my classmates. I figured studying philosophy would be just the ticket to give me direction.
About halfway through that notebook, my notations switched to ballpoint pen and my comments on the philosophers’quotes dwindled to just a few words, like “There’s got to be a better way” and “Help!” The final entry was from the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: “Every time I find the meaning of life, they change it.” Under it I had scribbled, “Now you tell me!” I must have been in my midthirties when I closed the book on “Pithies.”
My first reaction when I leafed through the notebook these decades later was to cringe at how naïve I had been. Did I really think I could learn how to live my life from philosophers, many of whom had lived thousands of years ago? What could I have been thinking?
Tips on how to live were few and far between in the philosophy texts I read as a student. Other questions needed to be answered first, such as, “How can we
know what is true?” and, “Is there a rational basis for ethical principles?” and, “What is the meaning of ‘meaning’?” After all, it made no sense to wonder about the meaning of life, mine or anybody else’s, if I didn’t know what “meaning” meant.
True. But in the meantime graduation was swiftly approaching, my adult life was about to begin in earnest, and I was desperate for some hints on what to do next. In the following years I dropped in and out of a couple of graduate schools of philosophy and supported myself by writing quiz questions and stunts for TV game shows, routines for stand-up comedians, and mystery novels. I also traveled a lot, usually lugging along a few philosophy books. I was still looking for ideas on how to live the best life.
Here and there, I did find some truly evocative hints and jotted them down in my increasingly tattered notebook that is, right up to the point when it struck me that I was on a naïf’s mission and I tucked “Pithies” into a box along with some old schoolbooks. That may have been around the same time I heard John Lennon famously declare, “Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.”
The question of how to live the best possible life had once been the central question of philosophy. It certainly had been what thinkers like Aristippus, Epicurus, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle had foremost on their minds. And in ensuing centuries, it was the fundamental question of a great variety of philosophers, from Humanists to Deists to Existentialists.
But in recent Western philosophy, the how-to-live question has pretty much taken a backseat to the questions of epistemology (How can we know what is real and true?) and logic (What are the necessary principles of reason and rational discourse?). With a few gratifying exceptions, contemporary academic philosophers leave the whole how-to-live business to daytime TV talk show hosts, smartly dressed motivational speakers, and pop gurus who tend to favor flowing robes. According to the academics, seeking an answer to the how-to-live question is definitely not the enterprise of any self-respecting modern philosopher.
That’s unfortunate, I thought, looking through my old notebook. After initially scoffing at my youthful naïveté, I now realized that those how-to-live questions were still very much alive in my mind. Sure, time had crept on and my
life, with its ups and downs, had simply happened, as lives tend to do, but my appetite for philosophical ideas about life had not diminished in the least. In fact, as I look at life from the vantage point of my eighth decade, my hankering for such ideas has only increased. Late in the game as it may be, I still want to live my final years the best way I can. But more compellingly, I find myself at that stage of life when I want to give my personal history one last look-through, and I am curious to see how it measures up to fully considered ideas of a good life.
So, forty years after my last entry in “Pithies,” I started jotting down new thoughts about those philosophers’quotes I had long ago copied in that notebook. And then I started collecting new quotes and noodling about them, too. Truth to tell, I was having a grand old time.
Some of these quotes sum up an entire philosophical position about how to live while others simply lob a provocative curveball in my direction, but all of them dazzle me now that I ponder them from this end of life. I am struck anew by how eloquent and inspiring great philosophers can be with just a few wellchosen words. I also realize that at my age one advantage of a concise philosophical statement is that I can still remember its beginning when I get to its end.
Personally, I have no problem with mass media gurus or motivational speakers, however they dress; I am sure they are honestly trying to answer a fundamental need in all of us. But some of the great philosophers propose truly trenchant, enduringly relevant ideas about the good life, and it would be a shame if those ideas became lost to us under a pile of pop slogans or, for that matter, under a pile of esoteric philosophical analyses of word meanings.
So here I offer my collection of concise philosophical precepts about how to live along with a personal commentary on each. Although my commentaries are meant to cast a small ray of illumination on these philosophical pronouncements, they sometimes waft off in the direction of irrelevance and self-indulgence. I have yet to find an acceptable excuse for these digressions.
Once I decided to share my Pithies with other people, I tried to figure out the best way to sequence them. Chronologically by when I jotted them down? That felt too arbitrary. By category, such as The Happy and Pleasant Life, The Meaningful or Meaningless Life, The Spiritual Life, and The Good and Just Life? The problem with the category route was that too many of the philosophers’ideas didn’t fit neatly under any single heading. So in the end I went by personal association, how one idea led me, often whimsically, to another or to put it another way, pretty much arbitrarily.
Here, then, are my Pithies, old and new, accompanied by my reflections, young and old. They may raise more questions than answers, but oh, what delicious questions they are.
“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”
EPICURUS, GREEK PHILOSOPHER (341–270 BC), HEDONIST
THIS WAS THE FIRST ENTRY IN MY OLD “PITHIES” NOTEBOOK. Hedonism appealed to me from the moment I discovered that it was a time-honored philosophy and not just a self-centered young man’s daydream. But even back then I must have sensed that I was chronically cautious. I wanted to have as much fun as I could, but I didn’t want to go overboard. Too scary. That is why Epicurus spoke to me: He was a careful hedonist.
Recently, Epicurus seems to be making a comeback with many thoughtful students. There is something appealingly New Agey about him. His aphorisms discovered in the Vatican Library millennia after his death read like bumper stickers written by a Zen Buddhist. Epicurus was the Prince of Pith.
In this aphorism, Epicurus is making two related points: First, desiring what we do not have now diminishes or even cancels out our appreciation of what we do have now; and second, when we take a moment to consider the outcome of actually getting that something else that we now desire, we will realize that it is just going to put us back at square one desiring yet something else. The overall lesson is: Enjoy the present it’s as good as it gets.
Pondering outcomes is fundamental to Epicurus’s general strategy for living a happy life. Not only should we think through the payoff of always desiring something more than what we have now, we should carefully think through the payoffs of all our desires. Like how do you think you would really feel if you followed your desire to bed your neighbor’s wife? Figure in your guilt and scheduling complications. Still worth it? Epicurus gives teeth to the old adage, “Beware of what you desire, for you may get it.”
This ancient Greek philosopher’s admonition to dump our aspirations if we want to enjoy a happy life resonates with many people today people who are starting to see the downside of always striving for more, more stuff and more achievements. The major drawback of the striving life Epicurus points out here is that there is always more to desire after a person acquires whatever it is he only recently yearned for, so he ends up with endlessly unsatisfied desire. “My brand-new Maserati sure is neat, but what I desperately need now is a tall blonde/gorgeous Romeo to sit in the passenger seat next to me.”
An insidious manner in which we fall into the aspirations trap is in our reverence for perfectionism. We are convinced that this quality is a sign of noble character. We urge our children to be perfectionists. But the outcome of perfectionism is that we are constantly looking for ways in which we or our products could be better. A successful painter I know once told me that when she looks at her work in a gallery, she always focuses on what is missing, what would have made it better. Epicurus is right: That is a guaranteed way never to feel completely fulfilled.
Is Epicurus suggesting that ideally we go through life without any desires at all? Just be happy with what we have and what we are currently doing? Nip all our longings in the bud all the way back to sexual desire and an appetite for meatloaf? Is that the only way to lead the happiest life?
Epicurus definitely thought so and he was that rare philosopher who not only talked the talk, but walked the walk. He chose celibacy for himself because he was convinced that sex inevitably led to unhappy feelings like jealousy and boredom. And although his diet was richer than the Buddha’s one grain of rice per day, Epicurus seemed happy to subsist on bread and water with an occasional lentil thrown in when he was feeling devilish. Like many philosophers, Epicurus was a man of extremes, choosing the perfect symmetry of black-and-white alternatives over nuanced subclauses of options. But unlike many philosophers, he really did practice his purist philosophy in his own life.
My dog, Snookers, is a natural hedonist and one reason for that is that he does not hold a long view of his life. He does not desist from eating a yummy cache of overripe mackerel he finds in our compost heap because it will cause him stomach cramps a few hours later. What’s “later” to Snookers? He simply enjoys each moment without analyzing future outcomes, poor guy. That little doggie does not have a clue of how to go about weighing his options, let alone making tradeoffs. We humans are far better equipped for that.
Or are we? Modern psychology raises some serious questions about our ability to foresee gratifying outcomes. In his remarkable book Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert demonstrates that we humans have a lousy record at predicting what will make us happy, from with whom we pair off to where we live. In most cases, Gilbert says, we would have the same chance of finding happiness by flipping a coin as we do by carefully deliberating our options.
Still, Epicurus’s Zenlike lesson does hit home for me, in fact more now than it did when I first read it. Although generally I do not drift away from the present by desiring more, frequently I do drift away from the present by fantasizing about what’s coming up next. I now realize that I have spent much of my life thinking about “What’s next?” While eating dinner, I will start thinking about what book I am going to read or what movie I am going to watch after dinner. Meantime, I am not focusing on my lovely mouthful of mashed potatoes.
In fact, “What’s next?” has been the leitmotif of my life. As a child, I constantly thought about what my life would be when I grew up; later, about what life I would lead when I graduated from college. On and on. Thus have I diluted my life. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “We are always getting ready to live, but never living.”
A fundamental tenet of many of the world’s major religions is that life on Earth is but a trifling stage on the way to Real Life, the life in the eternal hereafter. Our mission here is to prepare for that heavenly life, mostly to make sure we qualify for it. Other than that, our mundane lives do not mean a whole lot. So what we have here is a life of perpetual “What’s next?” Every moment of our earthly lives is focused on the next life.
Modern evangelists hit this point repeatedly in their sermons and homilies. Preaches Pastor Rick Warren: “Life on earth is just the dress rehearsal before the real production. You will spend far more time on the other side of death eternity than you will here. Earth is the staging area, the preschool, the try-out of your life in eternity. It is the practice workout before the actual game; the warm-up lap before the race begins. This life is preparation for the next.”
My personal “What’s next?” compulsion is far less comprehensive than the one Pastor Warren advertises, and it definitely lacks the Great Hereafter payoff he promises. And without this payoff, my habit makes no sense at all.
But I don’t want to brood about that now: Spending time regretting anything is another sure way of missing what is right in front of me. Furthermore, at my age and with my nonotherworldly worldview, I’m pretty sure I know what’s next.
“The art of life lies in taking pleasures as they pass, and the keenest pleasures are not intellectual, nor are they always moral.”
ARISTIPPUS, GREEK/LIBYAN PHILOSOPHER (435–356 BC), HEDONIST
I REMEMBER WHAT I WAS FEELING WHEN I WROTE THIS ONE down: Challenged! Dared! The 1960s were dawning along with their ethos of radical freedom and I felt tested by it. Suddenly, Epicurus’s cautious hedonism felt like a timid man’s bluff. My bluff.
Aristippus was the real deal, an unbridled Hedonist. None of that Epicurean parsing of pleasures. No if/then dithering about the lurking dangers and unwelcome outcomes of acting impulsively. No admonishments to be careful in taking your pleasures lest you hurt or upset someone else. And clearly, no finger wagging in the name of Virtue.
No, this ancient Greek philosopher urges us to get down and dirty. He wants us to be hedonists in the sense that word is used today: pure pleasure seekers. Sensualists! Animals!
Is Aristippus talking about that fancy sports car complete with the hot blonde/gorgeous Romeo in the passenger seat?
You betcha, if that is your “keenest” pleasure.
How about orgies?
Go for it, says Aristippus.
It even appears that the “art of life” could include some passing masochism if one agrees with the original sadomasochist, the Marquis de Sade, who wrote, “It is always by way of pain that one arrives at pleasure.”
Yes, this is definitely starting to feel like a scary dare, yet I cannot help but feel a certain admiration for the purity, so to speak, of Aristippus’s hedonism. He does not hedge on his “pure-pleasure-is-the-only-purpose-of-life” philosophy. He forces me to ask myself if there legitimately can be such a thing as a halfhedonist. And if so, what is the other half? A wuss?
It took courage for Aristippus to break completely with the teachings of his honored mentor, Socrates, who advocated a good and just life over a life of undisciplined frolicking. Apparently it also took some bitchiness on Aristippus’s part that is, if accounts of his gossipy opus, On the Luxury of the Ancient Greeks, are to be trusted. (Many scholars do not believe Aristippus wrote it.) In that National Enquirer–like history, Aristippus gleefully spills the beans on Plato’s romps with boy lovers. From some perspectives, Plato’s romps may not appear to be the behavior of a good and just Athenian, but, of course, ethical norms have a way of changing over time just as philosophies of life do.
As a guide to seeking out life’s pleasures, Aristippus flips Epicurus’s basic premise of hedonism upside down. Whereas Epicurus would have us rein in our desires and aspirations so that we can get the most pleasure out of what is right in front of us, Aristippus urges us to actively manipulate what is in front of us in order to maximize our pleasure. Man is the architect of his own pleasure dome.
Judging by Aristippus’s own life, one way he manipulated what was in front of him was by traveling from his birthplace, Cyrene (in ancient Libya), to Athens to Rhodes and back to Cyrene. In his day, this was equivalent to a world cruise. The way it worked for him seems to have been that when, say, he tired of the view from his terrace in Athens or of the arms of his favorite Athenian courtesan, the glamorous Lais, he packed his bags.
Another way Aristippus managed to make over his immediate environment was by shopping. Evidently, the man adored luxury. He was an early advocate of the “he-who-dies-with-the-most-toys-wins” school of hedonism. The way Aristippus could afford his self-indulgences was by charging his philosophy students tuition, a practice that both Socrates and Plato, early proponents of free access to information, abhorred. Epicurus would have strongly disapproved, too, starting with his precept that striving to achieve absolutely anything, even if it is only toys, is a sure way to miss out on an angst-free life. And for Epicurus, an angst-free life was the only truly happy one.
When I was in my late twenties living on the Greek island of Hydra, I witnessed another anxiety that Aristippus’s anything-goes hedonism can stir up. During that time, I often hung out with another expatriate, Habib, a wealthy Iranian who had been brought up in Paris. Habib was what was known as a fils a pappa a wayward young man who is such an embarrassment to his wealthy father that he is supplied with a tidy sum to just go away. Habib had the time and
money, not to mention the good looks, to do pretty much anything he wanted. Furthermore, Habib was not in the least inhibited by conventional norms of acceptable behavior. In short, he had the potential to enjoy Aristippus’s perfect life.
But Habib was overwhelmed by all his options. Why spend the night with Sophia when spending the night with Katrina might be even more sensational? Why smoke some opium when getting drunk on ouzo might be more fun? Or what about both? Time and again, I would find him on the terrace of Loulou’s taverna in a paralyzing dither. Often, I had to suppress a chuckle over his befuddling embarrassment of riches, but for Habib it was no laughing matter. Hedonism made him anxious.
Still, I definitely find something refreshing about Aristippus’s unequivocal, nononsense brand of hedonism. Among other things, it is not so cerebral as other philosophers’brands and for good reason: Aristippus was convinced that intellectual pleasures do not begin to measure up to sensual pleasures.
My dog, Snookers, would agree with Aristippus that is, if Snookers knew what agreement was. Yet therein lies the reason why I, personally, cannot subscribe to Aristippus’s art of life: I simply am not comfortable seeing myself as an animal with only animal appetites. Don’t get me wrong: I love and admire animals, Snookers in particular, but my human consciousness just cannot be denied. I guess it took Aristippus to force me to admit to myself just how anthropocentric I am.
So is my resolute humanness the only reason that I have never indulged in an orgy, appealing as that fantasy might be? Or, for that matter, is it the reason I never set out to acquire a closet full of Armani blazers?
I have to admit that, try as I might, I could never completely will away my ingrained anxieties anxieties very different from Habib’s, but just as inhibiting. For example, I worry that at an orgy I would find it hard to breathe under all those frenetic naked bodies. And then there’s my chronic laziness. Would I really have to get out of bed before dawn to make big-bucks deals on the Tokyo Stock Exchange? These apprehensions are undoubtedly what really account for my demurring from orgies and from demanding, money-driven labor. Not exactly a philosophical position, but there it is.
“Genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. This project is ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory.”
DAVID PEARCE, BRITISH PHILOSOPHER (1960– ), HEDONIST
THINKING ABOUT HEDONISM AS AN OLD GUY WHO HAS LIVED through some extraordinary “If-it-feels-good, it-is-good” periods of American life, I had to wonder if contemporary philosophers had been keeping up with our modern-day dolce vita. Well, it turns out they have and then some.
A bright young philosophy student I know put me on to a visionary contemporary philosopher and cult figure named David Pearce, author of the popular online book, The Hedonistic Imperative. Pearce is a certifiable mindblower. He forces me to ask myself if there is anything more valuable in life than feeling sensationally good all of the time. So into my recently resumed notebook Mr. Pearce went.
He starts out by taking his basic premises from two traditional philosophers, Epicurus and Jeremy Bentham, the eighteenth-century British social philosopher. From Epicurus comes the tenet that the happiest life is one of ataraxia freedom from fear and of aponia the absence of pain. And from Bentham comes the Utilitarian idea that all actions should be guided by the principle of providing the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Pearce believes not only that both of these ideals are self-evident, but also that they put a demand on us to do absolutely whatever is possible to make happiness universal. What Pearce adds to the hedonistic tradition is an up-to-date (and beyond) technical program for how to get there how to create an entire world of perpetually pain-free and depression-free people. The way he sees it, “Our descendants will be animated by gradients of genetically pre-programmed well-
being that are orders of magnitude richer than today’s peak experiences.” He is talking smiley faces everywhere, 24/7.
It may all sound like science fiction, but Pearce is an expert on nanotechnology (constructing devices, such as electronic circuits, out of single atoms and molecules), genetic engineering, and designer drugs. Apparently, while I have been quietly drinking vodka tonics, biomedicine has been busy concocting an astounding number of novel methods for what they call the “neuromodulation of mood.” These include transcranial magnetic stimulation, central nervous system prostheses, and electrical neurostimulation implants.
Not only does Pearce say that it is “ethically mandatory” to “eradicate suffering in all sentient life,” he is confident this is within our technological reach. Epicurus had his blueprint for avoiding pain, and Pearce is merely giving us a new and advanced blueprint for doing the same thing High Tech Hedonism.
But I do wonder if Pearce’s program is possible given certain limitations of the human condition. What I know about nanotechnology would fit in a molecule, but I have read a bit about the cultural history of altered consciousness.
When Indian and Ceylonese tea first came to England in the mid–seventeenth century, imbibers wrote rhapsodic essays about how deliriously happy this “hypnotic” made them. Some said they could not sleep for days afterward, so wired and besotted were they by one cup of the stuff. According to one eighteenth-century commentator, tea was so habit-forming that it did not take long for all of Great Britain to develop a serious tea addiction. So why, then, does your average, twenty-first-century London matron who consumes five cups of tea daily seem so sedate, so very far from ecstatic? Because they had stronger tea back in the old days?
That’s unlikely. It is probably because being high/stoned/drunk is always relative to “normal” consciousness, both normal for an individual and normal for the culture in which he lives. Over the centuries, virtually everyone in England has developed “tea consciousness.” That is not because absolutely everyone there drinks tea, but because a sufficient number did and do and their resulting consciousness became the norm. The culture born of tea consciousness informs daily language and personal interactions; it becomes part of the process of successful socialization. If virtually everyone regularly ate magic mushrooms, “magic-mushroom consciousness” would eventually become our norm. If you spent a long period of time in a magic-mushroom-consuming community, you
would soon realize that their language and its commonly understood referents are markedly different from those of talk around your home dinner table. The mushroom people are speaking the language of psychedelic consciousness and, over time, you would very likely acquire that consciousness and language whether or not you were a mushroom eater yourself. Similarly, computers and social media have changed the consciousness of our culture, affecting without our fully realizing it our accepted ideas of a normal attention span and personal intimacy.
The end result is that eventually tea (or mushroom or computer) consciousness simply begins to feel like normal consciousness, not higher or better consciousness. The feeling of being high is in its contrast to everyday consciousness; the only way we can feel high is for there to be something to feel higher than. In order for that London matron to feel more euphoric, she would have to try something else, say a glass or two of scotch at teatime; but, of course, that would only work for a limited amount of time because after a while “scotch consciousness” would become her normal consciousness. It is worth noting that people who are drunk all day every day do not strike me as a particularly happy lot.
One time in the 1960s when my friend Tom Cathcart and I were experimenting with LSD, Tom suddenly stopped gazing around rapturously and announced soberly, “Geez, you can always get higher, can’t you?”
The answer, sadly, is yes, we can always get higher. The reason we can always get higher is that we can only possess one consciousness at a time, and whatever that consciousness happens to be can always be transcended. Somewhere deep inside we all know this, but people who have gone on psychedelic trips are keenly aware of it. They have watched themselves jump from one level of consciousness and the euphoric feelings connected to that consciousness to another. They have even watched themselves watching themselves jump from one level of consciousness to another, which is a particularly dizzying quality of consciousness unto itself. As it happens, the limited size of our brains stops us in our transcendental tracks before we get within hailing distance of the end of this hall of mirrors.
The critical point is that knowing we can always get higher can be a real downer. It informs us that we are never going to reach the ultimate point of
happiness because there is no ultimate point of happiness. There is always a higher mountain thataway. For someone seeking ultimate bliss, this is a sobering thought. It all starts to feel futile. But not to worry: Soon enough the mountain on which we are currently sitting becomes our new normal consciousness and our level of happiness feels more or less the way it always has.
Experimental psychologists refer to this as our “happiness set point.” Their research suggests that inducing happy feelings cannot have lasting effects on our sense of well-being. Their “hedonic treadmill” thesis says that we constantly habituate ourselves to acquired levels of happiness and so we simply return to our original baseline level of feeling.
Here is where the “set-point” theory starts to both intrigue and confuse me. If everyone eventually returns to some baseline feeling, why are some people’s baselines higher than others’? And why are some cultures’baselines higher than others’?
Different societies clearly do have different general levels of well-being. The overall self-evaluated happiness of the people in southern Europe is significantly higher than that of the people in northern Europe. The Italians and Greeks laugh and smile more than the Germans and Dutch. They also take more pleasure in simple routines, like eating long lunches and sitting around and chatting. (This may very well be the root cause of the north-south economic tensions involving the euro currency; the northern Europeans think the southerners are lazy, while the southerners think the northerners don’t know how to live a good life.) While teaching for a semester in Rome, I read a newspaper survey of how the average Roman occupied his day: He spent a lot more time eating, napping, and chewing the fat than his counterpart in Berlin. My favorite statistic was that the average Roman spent an hour and a half each day listening to music. That must be hedonism at its most sublime.
In any event, Pearce will have none of this set-point theory. He points out that depressed people who take Prozac feel a lot better than they did before taking the antidepressant and most continue to feel that way as long as they take the pill. What is more, these people are fully conscious that they feel better than when they were depressed and are grateful for it. So, asks Pearce, why shouldn’t we all take pills or, for that matter, get electrical neurostimulation implants that continuously make us feel good, that make us, as Pearce says, “feel better than simply well”? He insists that our society and our psychotherapists have established the base point of feeling good and happy way too low. He writes, “[I]f we recalibrate our typical emotional set-point, then the greatest happiness
principle can be implemented far more successfully than in the wildest dreams of Bentham.”
But Pearce doesn’t give the full story here. A significant number of people on Prozac need to increase their dosage continually to stay free of depression. Could that be because after a while their medicated happiness set point starts to feel drab, even depressing? Wouldn’t that happen with neurostimulation implants, too? Pearce doesn’t fully answer the relativity-of-well-being problem. Okay, one more question about the genuine possibility of feeling terrific all the time. Taking a quick survey of the most ecstatic moments in my life, I would have to put sexual experiences at the top of the list. Now would I want all of my life to be one long orgasm? Alas, I think not, and I do not believe this is my age talking. Not only would this lifelong orgasm start to get strenuous after a month or two, it would probably get monotonous. I would start to miss other, less intense feelings.
Pearce is way ahead of me on this. He claims that his project would work it out so that we could calibrate our feelings to exactly the way we want them at any given moment. So while we are in one synthetically produced mood we will predetermine our next synthetically produced mood. I think I’ll go from some orgiastic ecstasy to a brief interlude of beatitude.
Even if Pearce’s feel-good utopia actually is possible in the not-too-distant future, the question remains: Is it a good idea?
Most people don’t think so, starting with their aversion to what they see as its artificiality. They say that if you only feel happy as a result of some transcranial magnetic stimulation, it is not real happiness. In fact, it is not the real you who feels happy. Incidentally, this distinguishes most people from most rats, who apparently do not mind if their happiness is artificially induced. In an often-cited rodent behavior study, rats kept pressing a lever that zapped their cranial pleasure center right up until they conked out, having skipped eating, drinking, and sleeping in order to keep their pleasure pulsing away nonstop.
Humans are less consistent on the artificial happiness issue. For example, most anti-artificial-happiness folks tend to make an exception for a couple of shots of bourbon at the end of a long day just to “loosen up.” Ditto for the occasional tranquilizer, joint, or can of Red Bull in the middle of the afternoon
for a little pick-me-up. But transcranial magnetic stimulation? No way. That is simply unnatural.
The most compelling critique of artificially induced emotions I have come across is in George Saunders’s short story “Escape from Spiderhead.” In this futuristic fable, the protagonist is a subject in experiments with mind- and emotion-altering drugs that are pumped into his system via a “MobiPak” surgically implanted to his lower back. In one experiment, he is placed in a room with a woman named Heather whom he initially finds unappealing; but once he is pumped with a finely titrated love/sex drug, he finds her irresistible. Heather is also so dosed. They make passionate love. He is convinced that she is his perfect match, the answer to his dreams. Later, he is chemically weaned from her to the point of indifference. And then he is presented with a new woman, Rachel, and the same sequence is repeated, complete with his sense of this woman being his one true love. Says the protagonist:
“Soon my memory of the perfect taste of Heather’s mouth was being overwritten by the current taste of Rachel’s mouth, so much more the taste I now desired. I was feeling unprecedented emotions, even though those unprecedented emotions were (I discerned somewhere in my consciousness) exactly the same emotions I had felt earlier, for that now unworthy-seeming vessel Heather. Rachel was, I mean to say, it. ”
Sublime love, total delight in finding one’s long-desired soul mate, is thus reduced to drops of a drug. And once the experimental subject knows that, strong as his current feelings are, he realizes that ultimately his love is meaningless. (Of course, some readers may see Saunders’s tale as wicked commentary on the undrugged, but nonetheless fickle, human heart.)
Deep down most of us ultimately prefer everyday reality to artificial reality. The late Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick offered a simple thought experiment he called the Experience Machine for sorting out how we stand on the everyday versus artificial reality choice: “Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Super duper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life experiences? [ . . . ] Of course, while in the tank you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think that it’s all actually happening[. . . . ] Would you plug in?”
It turns out that most people who tried this imaginary scenario on for size decided that in the end, they wouldn’t plug in, because they want to actually do certain things, not just have the “sense” of doing them. People simply feel a basic allegiance to everyday reality. They see it as the one true reality.
But Pearce has little patience with the artificial pleasure antagonists. He likes to point out that when anesthesia was introduced to operating rooms in the mid–nineteenth century, there was an outcry against its perverseness. One obstetrician who adamantly refused to use “gas therapy” for painful childbirth wrote that labor pains were “a most desirable, salutatory, and conservative manifestation of the life force.” And anesthesia was not a manifestation of the life force not natural so it was not good. Pearce’s anecdote is a good reminder of our innate stubbornness when faced with new methods, but I don’t think it completely addresses our preference for “real” everyday life.
A powerful argument against Pearce’s brave new world is inspired by the novel Brave New World. In Aldous Huxley’s fictional futuristic society, citizens get blissed out on the drug “soma,” which, as Huxley wryly puts it, has “all of the benefits of Christianity and alcohol without their defects.” Well, one defect: People on soma become dull, unimaginative, and lazy. Critics of Pearce worry that this is just the kind of society his universal hedonism would produce: meatheads from coast to coast.
Basically, this is a “no pain, no gain” argument for preserving human emotions like frustration, competitiveness, and general malaise. Such emotions are the mother of invention, progress, and a long view of life say a view of life that worries about global climate change or exhausting our natural resources. Absent these emotions, we would be happy to just sit still and be deliriously happy while the planet came to a standstill.
But it turns out to be more complicated than that. According to many psychologists, the happier people get, the better are their friendships, marriages, work performance, health, and income. In short, no pain, more gain.
Another point of view on the “no pain” problem comes from that perennially pessimistic philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, who believed in a sort of “no pain, more pain” scenario. He thought a Pearcelike contented world would end up making us more depressed than ever. In his Studies in Pessimism, he wrote: “If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and
honey, where every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom or hang themselves.”
Maybe there really is something deeply existential at risk in Pearce’s feelgood utopia. Perhaps we need to endure some pain in order to become fully human like the pain that comes from consciousness of our mortality, consciousness of our inevitable limitations and failures, and consciousness of all that is mysterious about existence itself. Without this consciousness, we might be nothing more than cheery animals. Our lives would be existentially shallow. But then again, if we are feeling absolutely hunky-dory all the time, who cares about all that existential stuff?
Sometimes Pearce’s argument for the perfectly happy man seems to me like hedonism gone mad. It feels like a vision of la-la land, a place where we are no longer genuinely human. But for that very reason, I think this young philosopher is absolutely brilliant. More than any other philosopher I know of, Pearce compels us to examine the foundation of hedonism. Is pleasure all we really want in our lives?
That must be pretty close to the first question for any philosophy of life.
“Life oscillates like a pendulum, back and forth between pain and boredom.”
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, GERMAN PHILOSOPHER (1788–1860), METAPHYSICIAN AND ETHICIST
OKAY, I ADMIT IT: EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE I DO HUNGER FOR A good dose of pessimism, especially when I am up against a rough patch in my life. It is callously comforting to think that life stinks for everyone when it happens to stink for me. At times like this, who better to turn to than Mr. Melancholia himself, Arthur Schopenhauer? I cannot remember exactly when I copied this one down into my notebook, but I bet it was during one of my deep-in-thedumps periods.
Hard as it is to believe, Schopenhauer is considered a hedonist because he acknowledged happiness as life’s ultimate goal. He just thought it was virtually impossible to get there. Like Epicurus, he defined happiness and pleasure as the absence of fear and pain. Also like Epicurus, Schopenhauer believed that reducing our expectations was the primary way to beat the blues. The German philosopher put it bluntly: “The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.” You have to love those words “very miserable”; Schopenhauer could not be content with simply saying “unhappy” as Epicurus did.
From there, Schopenhauer’s philosophy continues downhill, way downhill. In his tome The World as Will and Representation, he writes, “The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.” In The Vanity of Existence, he writes, “Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness. . . . This is direct proof that existence has no real value in itself.” And then, of course, there is his uber-dreary “pendulum” dictum. We get the idea.
At some point during a solitary young manhood rife with failure nobody bought his books, no university would take him on as a teacher Schopenhauer came upon the earliest Western-language translations of the Upanishads (also known as the Oupenkhat), a Buddhism-inspired Hindu text. In these mystical/metaphysical writings, he found a deep resonance with his own philosophy, although the Eastern philosophy ultimately bears a more positive outlook. The Upanishads suggest that through detachment and resignation a person may be able to experience a peaceful acceptance of life, an attitude that Schopenhauer gradually began to adopt toward the end of his life. In this latter period, he wrote that the Upanishads “has been the consolation of my life and will be of my death.” For Schopenhauer, admitting that he felt some consolation was roughly equivalent to anyone else shouting, “Whoopee!”
These Eastern texts appear to have significantly changed Schopenhauer’s life, although, ironically, in a very mundane way. In his sixties, he published a book titled Parerga and Paralipomena (Greek for “Appendices and Omissions”), much of it a rehash of his pessimistic philosophy, but a good part of it an assortment of catchy aphorisms. Lines like: “Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things,” and, “Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death,” and, “Honor has not to be won; it must only not be lost.”
Yup, a lot of it is fairly banal stuff, yet many people found these maxims as charming and winning as Epicurus’s aphorisms. In terms of Schopenhauer’s development as a writer, Parerga and Paralipomena’s format of bite-size precepts owes a great deal to the Eastern religious books he had read, particularly the Brahma Sutras, a Vedanta/Hindu volume of easy-to-swallow aphorisms.
Parerga and Paralipomena became a runaway bestseller. Suddenly Mr. Melancholia became the toast of the town, complete with fetching girlfriends, grand parties, and fan mail. His brand of pessimistic hedonism had found its audience. People saw something terribly romantic in all his sturm und drang, especially if they could read it in catchy, short bits while taking a hansom cab to Berlin’s fashionable Café Bauer.
The twentieth-century philosopher Bertrand Russell, by all accounts a generally charitable man, thought that Schopenhauer was a consummate
hypocrite. Wrote Russell: “He habitually dined well, at a good restaurant; he had many trivial love-affairs, which were sensual but not passionate; he was exceedingly quarrelsome and unusually avaricious. . . . It is difficult to believe that a man who was profoundly convinced of the virtue of asceticism and resignation would never have made any attempt to embody his convictions in his practice.”
In writing this, Russell could be accused of making an ad hominem criticism of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. But then again, Schopenhauer’s philosophy is ultimately about an attitude toward life and, among other things, an attitude toward life is a psychological phenomenon. Pessimism is something people feel and it colors the way they see things. This feeling may give birth to a philosophy, but in the end neither the feeling nor the philosophy can be proven. Modern psychologists would look at Schopenhauer’s life and see a man with a serious self-esteem problem who, after he became a big shot, overcame his depression and became a party animal. I get Russell’s point; that born-again party animal business makes it harder for me to take Schopenhauer’s abject world-weariness seriously.
In any event, at this point in my life I can never take Schopenhauer’s pessimism to heart for very long. Even in the worst of times, something usually comes along that spritzes me with hope some small, everyday event that unexpectedly revives my appetite for life.
Toward the end of Woody Allen’s movie Hannah and Her Sisters, the character Mickey (played by Allen) delivers a long monologue about a time in his life when he was so overcome by Schopenhauerian pessimism that he attempted suicide. His attempt failed and he started roaming the streets of New York, then impulsively ducked into a movie theater where the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup was playing. Recounts Mickey:
“I just needed a moment to gather my thoughts and, and be logical and put the world back into rational perspective. I went upstairs to the balcony, and I sat down, and, you know, the movie was a film that I’d seen many times in my life since I was a kid, and I always loved it. And, you know, I’m watching these people up on the screen and I started getting hooked on the film. And I started to feel, how can you even think of killing yourself? I mean isn’t it so stupid? I mean, look at all the people up there on the screen. You know, they’re real funny, and what if the worst is true.
“What if there’s no God, and you only go around once and that’s it. Well, you know, don’t you want to be part of the experience? . . . And then, I started to sit
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
the pool. The “herring” had been in, for there was a dead one lying on the bottom of weed, a golden fish silted over with fine mud.
Suddenly, on chancing to look bay-ward, I saw a small school of “herring” just off the mouth of the brook and scarce more than fifteen feet from the motionless rim of the tide. There were, perhaps, fifty or a hundred fish in the school. Occasional fins chopped the quiet water. “Herrings” of Eastham brook unable to enter the pond in which they were born, barred from it by a dam of Nature’s making. As I stood looking off to the baffled creatures, now huddled and seemingly still in deeper water, now huddled and all astir in the shallowest fringes of the tide, I began to reflect on Nature’s eagerness to sow life everywhere, to fill the planet with it, to crowd with it the earth, the air, and the seas. Into every empty corner, into all forgotten things and nooks, Nature struggles to pour life, pouring life into the dead, life into life itself. That immense, overwhelming, relentless, burning ardency of Nature for the stir of life! And all these her creatures, even as these thwarted lives, what travail, what hunger and cold, what bruising and slow-killing struggle will they not endure to accomplish the earth’s purpose? and what conscious resolution of men can equal their impersonal, their congregate will to yield self life to the will of life universal?
The tide ebbed, swiftly shallowing over the flats, the “herring” vanished from sight like a reflection from a glass; I could not tell when they were gone or the manner of their going.
Returning to the outer beach late in the afternoon, I found the ocean all a cold jade-green sown with whitecaps, the wind rising, and great broken clouds flowing over from the east. And in this northern current was a new warmth.
Chapter VIII NIGHT ON THE GREAT BEACH
IOur fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night. Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? Having made themselves at home in a civilization obsessed with power, which explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs? Be the answer what it will, to-day’s civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who have never even seen night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial night, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day.
Night is very beautiful on this great beach. It is the true other half of the day’s tremendous wheel; no lights without meaning stab or trouble it; it is beauty, it is fulfilment, it is rest. Thin clouds float in these heavens, islands of obscurity in a splendour of space and stars: the Milky Way bridges earth and ocean; the beach resolves itself into a unity of form, its summer lagoons, its slopes and uplands merging; against the western sky and the falling bow of sun rise the silent and superb undulations of the dunes.
My nights are at their darkest when a dense fog streams in from the sea under a black, unbroken floor of cloud. Such nights are rare, but are most to be expected when fog gathers off the coast in early summer; this last Wednesday night was the darkest I have known. Between ten o’clock and two in the morning three vessels stranded on the outer beach—a fisherman, a four-masted schooner, and a beam trawler. The fisherman and the schooner have been towed off, but the trawler, they say, is still ashore.
I went down to the beach that night just after ten o’clock. So utterly black, pitch dark it was, and so thick with moisture and trailing showers, that there was no sign whatever of the beam of Nauset; the sea was only a sound, and when I reached the edge of the surf the dunes themselves had disappeared behind. I stood as isolate in that immensity of rain and night as I might have stood in interplanetary space. The sea was troubled and noisy, and when I opened the darkness with an outlined cone of light from my electric torch I saw that the waves were washing up green coils of sea grass, all coldly wet and bright in the motionless and unnatural radiance. Far off a single ship was groaning its way along the shoals. The fog was compact of the finest moisture; passing by, it spun itself into my lens of light like a kind of strange, aërial, and liquid silk. Effin Chalke, the new coast guard, passed me going north, and told me that he had had news at the halfway house of the schooner at Cahoon’s.
It was dark, pitch dark to my eye, yet complete darkness, I imagine, is exceedingly rare, perhaps unknown in outer nature. The nearest natural approximation to it is probably the gloom of forest country buried in night and cloud. Dark as the night was here, there was still light on the surface of the planet. Standing on the shelving beach, with the surf breaking at my feet, I could see the endless wild uprush, slide, and withdrawal of the sea’s white rim of foam. The men at Nauset tell me that on such nights they follow along this vague crawl of whiteness, trusting to habit and a sixth sense to warn them of their approach to the halfway house.
Animals descend by starlight to the beach. North, beyond the dunes, muskrats forsake the cliff and nose about in the driftwood and weed, leaving intricate trails and figure eights to be obliterated by the day; the lesser folk—the mice, the occasional small sand-coloured
toads, the burrowing moles—keep to the upper beach and leave their tiny footprints under the overhanging wall. In autumn skunks, beset by a shrinking larder, go beach combing early in the night. The animal is by preference a clean feeder and turns up his nose at rankness. I almost stepped on a big fellow one night as I was walking north to meet the first man south from Nauset. There was a scamper, and the creature ran up the beach from under my feet; alarmed he certainly was, yet was he contained and continent. Deer are frequently seen, especially north of the light. I find their tracks upon the summer dunes.
Years ago, while camping on this beach north of Nauset, I went for a stroll along the top of the cliff at break of dawn. Though the path followed close enough along the edge, the beach below was often hidden, and I looked directly from the height to the flush of sunrise at sea. Presently the path, turning, approached the brink of the earth precipice, and on the beach below, in the cool, wet rosiness of dawn, I saw three deer playing. They frolicked, rose on their hind legs, scampered off, and returned again, and were merry. Just before sunrise they trotted off north together down the beach toward a hollow in the cliff and the path that climbs it.
Occasionally a sea creature visits the shore at night. Lone coast guardsmen, trudging the sand at some deserted hour, have been startled by seals. One man fell flat on a creature’s back, and it drew away from under him, flippering toward the sea, with a sound “halfway between a squeal and a bark.” I myself once had rather a start. It was long after sundown, the light dying and uncertain, and I was walking home on the top level of the beach and close along the slope descending to the ebbing tide. A little more than halfway to the Fo’castle a huge unexpected something suddenly writhed horribly in the darkness under my bare foot. I had stepped on a skate left stranded by some recent crest of surf, and my weight had momentarily annoyed it back to life.
The Highland Light
Facing north, the beam of Nauset becomes part of the dune night. As I walk toward it, I see the lantern, now as a star of light which waxes and wanes three mathematic times, now as a lovely pale flare of light behind the rounded summits of the dunes. The changes in the atmosphere change the colour of the beam; it is now whitish, now flame golden, now golden red; it changes its form as well, from a star to a blare of light, from a blare of light to a cone of radiance sweeping a circumference of fog. To the west of Nauset I often see the apocalyptic flash of the great light at the Highland reflected on the clouds or even on the moisture in the starlit air, and, seeing it, I often think of the pleasant hours I have spent there when George and Mary Smith were at the light and I had the good fortune to visit as their guest. Instead of going to sleep in the room under the eaves,
I would lie awake, looking out of a window to the great spokes of light revolving as solemnly as a part of the universe.
All night long the lights of coastwise vessels pass at sea, green lights going south, red lights moving north. Fishing schooners and flounder draggers anchor two or three miles out, and keep a bright riding light burning on the mast. I see them come to anchor at sundown, but I rarely see them go, for they are off at dawn. When busy at night, these fishermen illumine their decks with a scatter of oil flares. From shore, the ships might be thought afire. I have watched the scene through a night glass. I could see no smoke, only the waving flares, the reddish radiance on sail and rigging, an edge of reflection overside, and the enormous night and sea beyond.
One July night, as I returned at three o’clock from an expedition north, the whole night, in one strange, burning instant, turned into a phantom day. I stopped and, questioning, stared about. An enormous meteor, the largest I have ever seen, was consuming itself in an effulgence of light west of the zenith. Beach and dune and ocean appeared out of nothing, shadowless and motionless, a landscape whose every tremor and vibration were stilled, a landscape in a dream.
The beach at night has a voice all its own, a sound in fullest harmony with its spirit and mood—with its little, dry noise of sand forever moving, with its solemn, overspilling, rhythmic seas, with its eternity of stars that sometimes seem to hang down like lamps from the high heavens—and that sound the piping of a bird. As I walk the beach in early summer my solitary coming disturbs it on its nest, and it flies away, troubled, invisible, piping its sweet, plaintive cry. The bird I write of is the piping plover, Charadrius melodus, sometimes called the beach plover or the mourning bird. Its note is a whistled syllable, the loveliest musical note, I think, sounded by any North Atlantic bird.
Now that summer is here I often cook myself a camp supper on the beach. Beyond the crackling, salt-yellow driftwood flame, over the pyramid of barrel staves, broken boards, and old sticks all atwist with climbing fire, the unseen ocean thunders and booms, the breaker sounding hollow as it falls. The wall of the sand cliff behind, with its rim of grass and withering roots, its sandy crumblings and
erosions, stands gilded with flame; wind cries over it; a covey of sandpipers pass between the ocean and the fire. There are stars, and to the south Scorpio hangs curving down the sky with ringed Saturn shining in his claw.
Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity. By day, space is one with the earth and with man—it is his sun that is shining, his clouds that are floating past; at night, space is his no more. When the great earth, abandoning day, rolls up the deeps of the heavens and the universe, a new door opens for the human spirit, and there are few so clownish that some awareness of the mystery of being does not touch them as they gaze. For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars—pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time. Fugitive though the instant be, the spirit of man is, during it, ennobled by a genuine moment of emotional dignity, and poetry makes its own both the human spirit and experience.
II
At intervals during the summer, often enough when the tides are high and the moon is near the full, the surf along the beach turns from a churn of empty moonlit water to a mass of panic life Driven in by schools of larger fish, swarms of little fish enter the tumble of the surf, the eaters follow them, the surf catches them both up and throws them, mauled and confused, ashore.
Under a sailing moon, the whole churn of sea close off the beach vibrates with a primeval ferocity and intensity of life; yet is this war of rushing mouth and living food without a sound save for the breaking of the seas. But let me tell of such a night.
I had spent an afternoon ashore with friends, and they had driven me to Nauset Station just after nine o’clock. The moon, two days from the full, was very lovely on the moors and on the channels and flat, moon-green isles of the lagoon; the wind was southerly and
light. Moved by its own enormous rhythms, the surf that night was a stately incoming of high, serried waves, the last wave alone breaking. This inmost wave broke heavily in a smother and rebound of sandy foam, and thin sheets of seethe, racing before it up the beach, vanished endlessly into the endless thirst of the sands. As I neared the surf rim to begin my walk to the southward, I saw that the beach close along the breakers, as far as the eye would reach, was curiously atwinkle in the moonlight with the convulsive dance of myriads of tiny fish. The breakers were spilling them on the sands; the surf was aswarm with the creatures; it was indeed, for the time being, a surf of life. And this surf of life was breaking for miles along the Cape.
Little herring or mackerel? Sand eels? I picked a dancer out of the slide and held him up to the moon. It was the familiar sand eel or sand launce, Ammodytes americanus, of the waters between Hatteras and Labrador. This is no kin of the true eels, though he rather resembles one in general appearance, for his body is slender, eel-like, and round. Instead of ending bluntly, however, this “eel” has a large, well-forked tail. The fish in the surf were two and three inches long.
Homeward that night I walked barefooted in the surf, watching the convulsive, twinkling dance, now and then feeling the squirm of a fish across my toes. Presently something occurred which made me keep to the thinnest edge of the foam. Some ten feet ahead, an enormous dogfish was suddenly borne up the beach on the rim of a slide of foam; he moved with it unresisting while it carried him; the slide withdrawing and drying up, it rolled him twice over seaward; he then twisted heavily, and another minor slide carried him back again to shore. The fish was about three feet long, a real junior shark, purplish black in the increasing light—for the moon was moving west across the long axis of the breakers—and his dark, important bulk seemed strange in the bright dance of the smaller fish about him.
It was then that I began to look carefully at the width of gathering seas. Here were the greater fish, the mouths, the eaters who had driven the “eels” ashore to the edge of their world and into ours. The surf was alive with dogfish, aswarm with them, with the rush, the cold bellies, the twist and tear of their wolfish violence of life. Yet there
was but little sign of it in the waters—a rare fin slicing past, and once the odd and instant glimpse of a fish embedded like a fly in amber in the bright, overturning volute of a wave.
Too far in, the dogfish were now in the grip of the surf, and presently began to come ashore. As I walked the next half mile every other breaker seemed to leave behind its ebb a mauled and stranded sharklet feebly sculling with his tail. I kicked many back into the seas, risking a toe, perhaps; some I caught by the tails and flung, for I did not want them corrupting on the beach. The next morning, in the mile and three quarters between the Fo’castle and the station, I counted seventy-one dogfish lying dead on the upper beach. There were also a dozen or two skates—the skate is really a kind of shark —which had stranded the same night. Skates follow in many things, and are forever being flung upon these sands.
I sat up late that night at the Fo’castle, often putting down the book I read to return to the beach.
A little after eleven came Bill Eldredge to the door, with a grin on his face and one hand held behind his back. “Have you ordered tomorrow’s dinner yet?” said he. “No.” “Well, here it is,” and Bill produced a fine cod from behind his back. “Just found him right in front of your door, alive and flopping. Yes, yes, haddock and cod often chase those sand eels in with the bigger fish; often find them on the beach about this time of the year. Got any place to keep him? Let me have a piece of string and I’ll hang him on your clothesline. He’ll keep all right.” With a deft unforking of two fingers, Bill drew the line through the gills, and as he did so the heavy fish flopped noisily. No fear about him being dead. Make a nice chowder. Bill stepped outside; I heard him at the clothesline. Afterward we talked till it was time for him to shoulder his clock and Coston case again, pick up his watch cap, whistle in his little black dog, and go down over the dune to the beach and Nauset Station.
The Sequel of Fog on a Summer Night
There were nights in June when there was phosphorescence in the surf and on the beach, and one such night I think I shall remember as the most strange and beautiful of all the year.
Early this summer the middle beach moulded itself into a bar, and between it and the dunes are long, shallow runnels into which the ocean spills over at high tide. On the night I write of, the first quarter of the moon hung in the west, and its light on the sheets of incoming tide coursing thin across the bar was very beautiful to see. Just after sundown I walked to Nauset with friends who had been with me during the afternoon; the tide was still rising, and a current running in the pools. I lingered at the station with my friends till the last of sunset had died, and the light upon the planet, which had been moonlight mingled with sunset pink, had cleared to pure cold moon.
Southward, then, I turned, and because the flooded runnels were deep close by the station, I could not cross them and had to walk their inner shores. The tide had fallen half a foot, perhaps, but the breakers were still leaping up against the bar as against a wall, the greater ones still spilling over sheets of vanishing foam.
It grew darker with the westing of the moon. There was light on the western tops of the dunes, a fainter light on the lower beach and the
breakers; the face of the dunes was a unity of dusk.
The tide had ebbed in the pools, and their edges were wet and dark. There was a strange contrast between the still levels of the pool and the seethe of the sea. I kept close to the land edge of the lagoons, and as I advanced my boots kicked wet spatters of sand ahead as they might have kicked particles of snow. Every spatter was a crumb of phosphorescence; I walked in a dust of stars. Behind me, in my footprints, luminous patches burned. With the double-ebb moonlight and tide, the deepening brims of the pools took shape in smouldering, wet fire. So strangely did the luminous speckles smoulder and die and glow that it seemed as if some wind were passing, by whose breath they were kindled and extinguished. Occasional whole breakers of phosphorescence rolled in out of the vague sea—the whole wave one ghostly motion, one creamy light— and, breaking against the bar, flung up pale sprays of fire.
A strange thing happens here during these luminous tides. The phosphorescence is itself a mass of life, sometimes protozoan its origin, sometimes bacterial, the phosphorescence I write of being probably the latter. Once this living light has seeped into the beach, colonies of it speedily invade the tissues of the ten thousand thousand sand fleas which are forever hopping on this edge of ocean. Within an hour the grey bodies of these swarming amphipods, these useful, ever hungry sea scavengers (Orchestia agilis; Talorchestia megalophthalma), show phosphorescent pinpoints, and these points grow and unite till the whole creature is luminous. The attack is really a disease, an infection of light. The process had already begun when I arrived on the beach on the night of which I am writing, and the luminous fleas hopping off before my boots were an extraordinary sight. It was curious to see them hop from the pool rims to the upper beach, paling as they reached the width of peaceful moonlight lying landward of the strange, crawling beauty of the pools. This infection kills them, I think; at least, I have often found the larger creature lying dead on the fringe of the beach, his huge porcelain eyes and water-grey body one core of living fire. Round and about him, disregarding, ten thousand kinsmen, carrying on life and the plan of life, ate of the bounty of the tide.
III
All winter long I slept on a couch in my larger room, but with the coming of warm weather I have put my bedroom in order—I used it as a kind of storage space during the cold season—and returned to my old and rather rusty iron cot. Every once in a while, however, moved by some obscure mood, I lift off the bedclothing and make up the couch again for a few nights. I like the seven windows of the larger room, and the sense one may have there of being almost outof-doors. My couch stands alongside the two front windows, and from my pillow I can look out to sea and watch the passing lights, the stars rising over ocean, the swaying lanterns of the anchored fishermen, and the white spill of the surf whose long sound fills the quiet of the dunes.
Ever since my coming I have wanted to see a thunderstorm bear down upon this elemental coast. A thunderstorm is a “tempest” on the Cape. The quoted word, as Shakespeare used it, means lightning and thunder, and it is in this old and beautiful Elizabethan sense that the word is used in Eastham. When a schoolboy in the Orleans or the Wellfleet High reads the Shakespearean play, its title means to him exactly what it meant to the man from Stratford; elsewhere in America, the terms seems to mean anything from a tornado to a blizzard. I imagine that this old significance of the word is now to be found only in certain parts of England and Cape Cod.
On the night of the June tempest, I was sleeping in my larger room, the windows were open, and the first low roll of thunder opened my eyes. It had been very still when I went to bed, but now a wind from the west-nor’west was blowing through the windows in a strong and steady current, and as I closed them there was lightning to the west and far away. I looked at my watch; it was just after one o’clock. Then came a time of waiting in the darkness, long minutes broken by more thunder, and intervals of quiet in which I heard a faintest sound of light surf upon the beach. Suddenly the heavens cracked open in an immense instant of pinkish-violet lightning. My seven windows filled with the violent, inhuman light, and I had a
glimpse of the great, solitary dunes staringly empty of familiar shadows; a tremendous crash then mingled with the withdrawal of the light, and echoes of thunder rumbled away and grew faint in a returning rush of darkness. A moment after, rain began to fall gently as if someone had just released its flow, a blessed sound on a roof of wooden shingles, and one I have loved ever since I was a child. From a gentle patter the sound of the rain grew swiftly to a drumming roar, and with the rain came the chuckling of water from the eaves. The tempest was crossing the Cape, striking at the ancient land on its way to the heavens above the sea.
Now came flash after stabbing flash amid a roaring of rain, and heavy thunder that rolled on till its last echoes were swallowed up in vast detonations which jarred the walls. Houses were struck that night in Eastham village. My lonely world, full of lightning and rain, was strange to look upon. I do not share the usual fear of lightning, but that night there came over me, for the first and last time of all my solitary year, a sense of isolation and remoteness from my kind. I remember that I stood up, watching, in the middle of the room. On the great marshes the lightning surfaced the winding channels with a metallic splendour and arrest of motion, all very strange through windows blurred by rain. Under the violences of light the great dunes took on a kind of elemental passivity, the quiet of earth enchanted into stone, and as I watched them appear and plunge back into a darkness that had an intensity of its own I felt, as never before, a sense of the vast time, of the thousands of cyclic and uncounted years which had passed since these giants had risen from the dark ocean at their feet and given themselves to the wind and the bright day.
Fantastic things were visible at sea. Beaten down by the rain, and sheltered by the Cape itself from the river of west wind, the offshore brim of ocean remained unusually calm. The tide was about halfway up the beach, and rising, and long parallels of low waves, forming close inshore, were curling over and breaking placidly along the lonely, rain-drenched miles. The intense crackling flares and quiverings of the storm, moving out to sea, illumined every inch of the beach and the plain of the Atlantic, all save the hollow bellies of the little breakers, which were shielded from the light by their
overcurling crests. The effect was dramatic and strangely beautiful, for what one saw was a bright ocean rimmed with parallel bands of blackest advancing darkness, each one melting back to light as the wave toppled down upon the beach in foam.
Stars came out after the storm, and when I woke again before sunrise I found the heavens and the earth rainwashed, cool, and clear. Saturn and the Scorpion were setting, but Jupiter was riding the zenith and paling on his throne. The tide was low in the marsh channels; the gulls had scarcely stirred upon their gravel banks and bars. Suddenly, thus wandering about, I disturbed a song sparrow on her nest. She flew to the roof of my house, grasped the ridgepole, and turned about, apprehensive, inquiring ... ’tsiped her monosyllable of alarm. Then back toward her nest she flew, alighted in a plum bush, and, reassured at last, trilled out a morning song.
Piping Plover at Nest
Chapter IX THE YEAR AT HIGH TIDE
IHad I room in this book, I should like to write a whole chapter on the sense of smell, for all my life long I have had of that sense an individual enjoyment. To my mind, we live too completely by the eye. I like a good smell—the smell of a freshly ploughed field on a warm morning after a night of April rain, the clovelike aroma of our wild Cape Cod pinks, the morning perfume of lilacs showery with dew, the good reek of hot salt grass and low tide blowing from these meadows late on summer afternoons.
What a stench modern civilization breathes, and how have we ever learned to endure that foul blue air? In the Seventeenth Century, the air about a city must have been much the same air as overhung a large village; to-day the town atmosphere is to be endured only by the new synthetic man.
Our whole English tradition neglects smell. In English, the nose is still something of an indelicate organ, and I am not so sure that its use is not regarded as somewhat sensual. Our literary pictures, our poetic landscapes are things to hang on the mind’s wall, things for the eye. French letters are more indulgent to the nose; one can scarcely read ten lines of any French verse without encountering the omnipresent, the inevitable parfum. And here the French are right, for though the eye is the human master sense and chief æsthetic gate, the creation of a mood or of a moment of earth poetry is a rite for which other senses may be properly invoked. Of all such appeals to sensory recollection, none are more powerful, none open a wider door in the brain than an appeal to the nose. It is a sense that every lover of the elemental world ought to use, and, using, enjoy. We ought to keep all senses vibrant and alive. Had we done so, we
should never have built a civilization which outrages them, which so outrages them, indeed, that a vicious circle has been established and the dull sense grown duller.
One reason for my love of this great beach is that, living here, I dwell in a world that has a good natural smell, that is full of keen, vivid, and interesting savours and fragrances. I have them at their best, perhaps, when hot days are dulled with a warm rain. So well do I know them, indeed, that were I blindfolded and led about the summer beach, I think I could tell on what part of it I was at any moment standing. At the ocean’s very edge the air is almost always cool—cold even—and delicately moist with surf spray and the endless dissolution of the innumerable bubbles of the foam slides; the wet sand slope beneath exhales a cool savour of mingling beach and sea, and the innermost breakers push ahead of them puffs of this fragrant air. It is a singular experience to walk this brim of ocean when the wind is blowing almost directly down the beach, but now veering a point toward the dunes, now a point toward the sea. For twenty feet a humid and tropical exhalation of hot, wet sand encircles one, and from this one steps, as through a door, into as many yards of mid-September. In a point of time, one goes from Central America to Maine.
Atop the broad eight-foot back of the summer bar, inland forty feet or so from the edge of low tide, other odours wait. Here have the tides strewn a moist tableland with lumpy tangles, wisps, and matted festoons of ocean vegetation—with common sea grass, with rockweed olive-green and rockweed olive-brown, with the crushed and wrinkled green leaves of sea lettuce, with edible, purple-red dulse and bleached sea moss, with slimy and gelatinous cords seven and eight feet long. In the hot noontide they lie, slowly, slowly withering—for their very substance is water—and sending an odour of ocean and vegetation into the burning air. I like this good natural savour. Sometimes a dead, surf-trapped fish, perhaps a dead skate curling up in the heat, adds to this odour of vegetation a faint fishy rankness, but the smell is not earth corruption, and the scavengers of the beach soon enough remove the cause.
Beyond the bar and the tidal runnel farther in, the flat region I call the upper beach runs back to the shadeless bastion of the dunes. In
summer this beach is rarely covered by the tides. Here lies a hot and pleasant odour of sand. I find myself an angle of shade slanting off from a mass of wreckage still embedded in a dune, take up a handful of the dry, bright sand, sift it slowly through my fingers, and note how the heat brings out the fine, sharp, stony smell of it. There is weed here, too, well buried in the dry sand—flotsam of last month’s high, full-moon tides. In the shadowless glare, the topmost fronds and heart-shaped air sacs have ripened to an odd iodine orange and a blackish iodine brown. Overwhelmed thus by sand and heat, the aroma of this foliage has dissolved; only a shower will summon it again from these crisping, strangely coloured leaves.
Nesting Tern
Cool breath of eastern ocean, the aroma of beach vegetation in the sun, the hot, pungent exhalation of fine sand—these mingled are the midsummer savour of the beach.
In my open, treeless world, the year is at flood tide. All day long and all night long, for four days and five days, the southwest wind blows across the Cape with the tireless constancy of a planetary river. The sun, descending the altar of the year, pauses ritually on the steps of the summer months, the disk of flame overflowing. On hot days the beach is tremulous with rising, visible heat bent seaward by the wind; a blue haze hangs inland over the moors and the great marsh blotting out pictorial individualities and reducing the landscape to a mass. Dune days are sometimes hotter than village days, for the naked glare of sand reflects the heat; dune nights are always cooler. On its sun-trodden sand, between the marsh wind and the coolness of ocean, the Fo’castle has been as comfortable as a ship at sea.
The duneland air burns with the smell of sand, ocean, and sun. On the tops of the hills, the grass stands at its tallest and greenest, its new straw-green seed plumes rising through a dead crop of last year’s withered spears. On some leaves there is already a tiny spot of orange wither at the very tip, and thin lines of wither descending on either edge. Grasses in the salt meadows are fruiting; there are brownish and greenish-yellow patches on the levels of summer green. On the dunes, the sand lies quiescent in a tangle of grass; in naked places, it lies as if it were held down by the sun. When there has been no rain for a week or more, and the slanting flame has been heavy on the beach, the sand in my path down Fo’castle dune becomes so dry, so loose and deep, that I trudge through it as through snow.
The winter sea was a mirror in a cold, half-lighted room, the summer sea is a mirror in a room burning with light. So abundant is the light and so huge the mirror that the whole of a summer day floats reflected on the glass. Colours gather there, sunrise and twilight, cloud shadows and cloud reflections, the pewter dullness of gathering rain, the blue, burning splendour of space swept free of every cloud. Light transfixes ocean, and some warmth steals in with the light, but the waves that glint in the sun are still a tingling cold.
Now do insects inherit the warm earth. When a sluggish wind blows from the marsh on a hot day, the dunes can be tropical. The sand quivers with insect lives. On such days, “greenheads,” Tabanus
costalis, stab and buzz, sand gnats or “no-see-ums” gather in myriads on the sun-drenched south wall of the house, “flatiron flies” and minor unknowns swarm to the attack. One must remain indoors or take a precarious refuge at the ocean’s very edge. Thanks to the wind, the coolness, and the spray, the lower beach is usually free of insect bloodletters, though the bullying, poisonous Tabanid, in the mid-August height of his season, can be a hateful nuisance. So far, however, I have had but two of these tropical visitations. Barring an extra allowance of greenheads, the dunes are probably quite as habitable as any stretch of outermost beach. The wind, moreover, saves me from mosquitoes.
Ants have appeared, and the upper beach is pitted with their hills; I watch the tiny, red-brown creatures running in and out of buried weed. Just outside each hole, the fine sand is all delicately ascrawl with the small, endless comings and goings. The whole upper beach, indeed, has become a plain of intense and minute life; there are tunnels and doors and pitways everywhere. The dune locusts that were so small in June have grown large and learned to make a sound. All up and down the dunes, sometimes swept seaward out of their course by the west wind, go various butterflies. When I turn up driftwood in the dunes, or walk the wheel ruts in the meadows, crickets race off into the grass.
On the dunes, in open places near thin grass, I find the deep, finger-round mine shafts of the dune spider. A foot below, in the cooler sand, lives the black female; dig her up, and you will find a hairy, spidery ball. During the summer months the lady does not leave her cave, but in early autumn she revisits the world and scuttles through the dune grass, black, fast, and formidable. The smaller, sand-coloured male runs about everywhere. I saw one on the beach the other night, running along in cloudy moonlight, and mistook him at first for a small crab. Later the same night, I found a tiny, sand-coloured dune toad at the very brim of the surf, and wondered if an appetite for beach fleas had led him there.
“June bugs,” Lachnosterna arcuata, strike my screens with a formidable boom and linger there formidably buzzing; let me but open the door, and half a dozen are tilting at my table lamp and falling stunned upon the cloth. On mounded slopes of sand, solitary
black wasps scratch themselves out a cave; across my paths move the shadows of giant dragon flies.
The straggling beach peas of the region are in bloom; the west wind blows the grass and rushes out to the rippled levels of a level sea; heat clouds hang motionless on the land horizon, their lower rims lost in the general haze; the great sun overflows; the year burns on.
III
I have spoken in another chapter of the melting away of bird life from this region during April and May. There was a time when the allthe-year-round herring gulls seemed the only birds left to me, and many of these were immature birds or birds whose plumage was then changing from immature brown to adult white and grey. One cold, foggy morning late in May, I woke to find the beach in front of the Fo’castle crowded with these gulls, for a number of hake had stranded during the night, and the birds had discovered them and come to feed. Some fed on the fresh fish, findings being keepings—I saw various birds defend their individual repasts from late arrivals and would-be sharers with a show of wings and a hostile cry—others stood on the top of the beach in a long, senatorial row facing the sea. The maturing birds were of all tones of white and brown; some were chalky and brown, some were speckled like hens, others were a curious brown-mottled chalky grey The moults of herring gulls are complicated affairs. There are spring moults and autumn moults, partial moults and second nuptial plumages. Not until the third year or later does the bird seem to assume its full nuptial and adult coloration.
When I first open my eyes on a bright midsummer morning, the first sound that becomes part of my waking consciousness is the recurrent rush and spill of the summer sea; then do I hear a patter of tiny feet on the roof over my head and the cheerful notes of a song sparrow’s home-spun tune. These sparrows are the songbirds of the dunes. I hear them all day long, for I have a pair nesting on the seaward slope of this dune in a clump of dusty miller. My building of
